Progress so far...

What difference a week makes?

With less than two weeks to go(!) the build is coming on nicely: the dry stone roof on the Trulli Building is about half way to completion and the Monocouche rendering of the walls has begun.

Nigel Dunnett has been up to Lindum Turf in York, to have a look at the bespoke native/exotic meadows for the RBC Blue Water Garden.  These have been made up according to Nigel’s experimental perennial seed mixes, and grown for the last year as pre-vegetated perennial mats, ready to be planted on site as ready-made ornamental meadows.  It’s very exciting because the meadows are just coming into flower, and should be perfect for Chelsea!

Within Nigel’s special mix the Verbascum phoenecium ‘Purpurea’, Knautia arvensis, Linum perenne, and Dianthus carthusianorum are starting to flower. Can’t wait to see the finished planting!

Yesterday (Day Zero) our Landform foremen Rich & Mark B, and Ed, from the Landscape Agency, were busy setting out.  As you can see – they were also avoiding small swamps on the plot! We are next to the Rock Bank Restaurant at the south end of Main Avenue, to help you get your bearings!

Blue Water plot under water on "Setting Out" day!

And – what difference a day makes! Day One and all the foundations for the Trulli Building and the water feature have been excavated.  The Team Tea Shed has been errected!

Day One on site at RHS Chelsea

Meanwhile – quite a coup for Nigel Dunnett and the Planting Team: we have 550 lilies being delivered.  Just need to make sure they are at peak for the judging. If we can pull it off, no one will have seen anything like this before!

We’re busy completing orders of materials and carrying out general housekeeping like getting parking to the showground organised, our construction signs printed up  - even making sure our Team will have plenty of tea and coffee for their breaks – and washing up liquid to clean the cups!

Meanwhile Nigel Dunnett and Ed Payne from The Landscape Agency came to visit us this week, to go through the final preparations before we start on site. They had a productive day going through the plans and the details, but they also came to inspect the samples we have at the yard.

Here is Mark showing the dry stone roofing sample and stone for the Trulli Pavillion, and with Catherine and Ed looking at plans:

Nigel has been busy making the final tree selections at Hilliers Nursery. Among the specimens he has chosen the beautiful and impressive, but little-know, upright form of our native Field Maple – Acer campestre ‘William Caldwell’.  These will be planted in a strip along the side of the garden.

Nigel with the Acer campestre 'William Caldwell'

He also viewed the Italian cypresses (photographed here with Jim Hillier) which will punctuate the formal terraces.

Nigel with Jim Hillier & Italian cypresses

And also seen – a special form of Prunus serrulata, which is a stunning multi stemmed tree with glowing bark.  These will frame the Trulli Building at the top of the garden.

Prunus serrulata for framing the Trulli Pavillion

The Blue Water Garden features a unique Trulli style pavillion structure. We’re working with Welding Mobility again this year (they worked on the structure for the pavillion in the Australia Garden 2011) and they’ve been busy fabricating the steel structure for the building, which will be ready to drop into place when we start the build.

The finished steel structure will be delivered to the Chelsea Show ground at the beginning of May.  It will then be clad in stud work and a Monocouche render applied.

The roof is going to be installed by dry stone specialist Andy Lowden.  Andy has been assembling pieces of stone as an example to show how the finished effect will look.

We’ll bring you more about progress on the Royal Bank of Canada Blue Water Show Garden when Build-up starts at the beginning of May.

We are pleased to be designing and building the hard and soft landscaping for the Hartley Botanic show stand at this year’s Chelsea Flower Show.  Hartley Botanic is known for award-winning greenhouses and glasshouses. They are presenting four of their wonderful designs.

French Styled Orangery at the 2007 Chelsea Flower Show

The planting colours will be reds, rusts, pinks and white. We’ve already selected the trees from Majestic Trees.  Some beautiful Betula nigra specimens which have an interesting bark texture.

Bark texture of Betula nigra

We’ll update you more about the planting and installation during Build-up, but in the meantime, we will be collaborating with Mark Straver or Hortus Loci and Dave Root of Kelways Plants.

Landform have been helping with the installation.  Mike and Ross have been popping to Kew quite a bit recently: marking out the circles, cutting away the turf and helping with the planting.  The installation spans 50 metres and comprises of hundreds and hundreds of Viola ‘Light Blue’, Viola ‘Clear Yellow’, Viola ‘Black Delight’, apple mint (Mentha suaveolens) and Viola ‘Red Blotch’ plants.

Setting out the Olympic Rings

Also as a part of the installation, we worked with Sureset to produce 10 resin coloured paths allowing people to walk through the circles.  Sureset’s resin bonded gravel usually comes in natural gravel colours,  but they can produce brightly coloured patterns, which can be ingeniously used for ground designs in school playgrounds.  Visit their site to see more about what they do.

The BBC have made a little film about the display – visit YouTube to see the film.  If you look closely at the beginning you can see Mike and Ross cutting the turf away!

To find out more about what Kew are doing to commemorate the London Olympic games – visit their web site.

The completed Rings with Sureset coloured resin paths

The brief was to create a modern, contemporary design to give year round interest, but the most important thing was to give a “wow-factor” that all the residents and any visitors could enjoy. The planting scheme incorporates drought tolerant plants, grasses and bulbs  for seasonal interest, including plants like lavender, with a central mature Gleditsia triacanthos ‘Sunburst’ tree and rockery.

The roundabout is only in its infancy, but we’ll show you more pictures as the year goes on to show how the planting has developed.

This type of job is “all in a day’s work” for the Landform Team, but the job involved a lot of meticulous planning and careful management of health & safety due to the nature of the site. Following all good health & safety practices, we carried out a method statement, risk assessments and the installation involved traffic management.  Health & safety is something we take seriously at Landform.

We are raising money for the AICR (Association of International Cancer Research) again, who Mark & Matt ran for last year. If you’ve followed our marathon stories in the past you will know that raising money for cancer research is important to not just Mark & Matt, but the whole company. Many of us know people who have contracted cancer. If you would like to help us raise money for our chosen charity visit our justgiving.com page and sponsor Mark & Matt.  They’ve each made a rash promise to don a pink tutu if we reach our total. Remember – only IF we reach our total!

You would think they would take it all in their stride, but it’s not been easy this year! During the 2011 marathon, Matt was unlucky and ran onto one of the plastic water bottles that litter the marathon route.  It caused a fracture in his foot, but he still completed the marathon through determination. The fracture took a few months to heal, and whilst Matt doesn’t feel any pain whilst he runs, he does feel some pain afterwards.  Still that’s not stopped him from throwing himself into his training and participating in the “Bath Half” recently.

Mark on the other hand has been battling on with an Achilles problem, so his marathon training was delayed for a while as he was advised to rest it for a bit.  Mark’s hoping he can complete his fourth marathon in a row with some specially engineered running shoes to help alleviate the Achilles issue.

To sponsor Mark & Matt and find out more about the AICR charity – visit our www.justgiving.com/LandformTeamAICR page.

The RBC Blue Water Garden designed by Nigel Dunnett

We’ve been quietly beavering away in the background for over a month, having meetings about the Chelsea Flower Show garden we are building in 2012. We are pleased to be collaborating with Nigel Dunnett and The Landscape Agency again this year and it’s another stunning and sustainable design.

The concept behind The Blue Water Garden shows how rain-garden and water conservation concepts can be used in formal settings. Most ‘sustainable’ gardens, take a naturalistic and organic form, but this garden is geometric in structure and shows how even the most formal of gardens can be environmentally-beneficial.

Like the ‘New Wild Garden’ we built in 2011, the new garden will include a full range of water conservation features, together with wildlife-friendly elements. Water is becoming increasingly more precious and there is a real need to create gardens that conserve, preserve and treasure water.

The garden’s design contains a “bio-swale”. Bio-swales are linear vegetated features that collect rainwater runoff and either transport it or enable it to infiltrate back into the ground. They can be richly planted and have high ecological value.

The planting will be dramatic, colourful and naturalistic in Nigel Dunnett ’s typical style, and is loosely modelled on beautiful examples of dry meadows from around the world (i.e little or no irrigation is required).  The formal style will be punctuated with multistem Zelkova serrata trees, Cupressus and Carpinus columns.

For the hard landscaping, the main paths will be made using Portland stone, and decorative gravel will compliment the path edges.  The walls used to create garden rooms will have a textured render finish.

An iconic “Trulli” style building will feature a traditional stone roof.

We’ll have more posts in the coming weeks, focusing on the different elements in the garden in more detail, but we can’t wait to get stuck in! It’s only 11 weeks to go until Build-up starts!

In preparation for the Tropical Extravaganza at Kew Gardens, Mike P and Ross have been helping the Kew Team to prepare the Orchid displays in the Prince of Wales Conservatory this week. They said that it’s been around 15 degrees in there!

Mike & Ross with their handywork at Kew Gardens

This year the theme is inspired by the “forces of nature” – Fire, Air, Water and Earth, and we will see a fantastic display of colour in the glass house.

Mike and Ross have been attaching Orchids and other tropical plants to steel archways that go over the meandering paths.

The festival promotes awareness about the habitats for Orchids and tropical plants, and the threats posed by deforestation and loss of habitat.

We’re really looking forward to seeing the display which runs from 4^th February to 4^th March. Check out Kew’s website for more information.

A resident Chinese Water Dragon inside the Prince of Wales Conservatory